The Amazing Adventures of Geek Girl : search

Enterprise Search from Microsoft - Comparison

tara — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:41:33 GMT

Microsoft has three main offerings in the enterprise search space, from small scale search to solutions that are scalable to support extremely demanding search challenges. The table below, taken from the Microsoft Enterprise Search website, gives an overview of the three solutions.

Best-in-class enterprise search
for the most demanding applications

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The ability to enhance your content at the time of indexing—through content processing capabilities such as format conversion, language detection, and entity extraction—significantly increases the information's value to your users.
You need extreme scale—sub-second response time with the ability to handle millions to billions of documents.
Your user experience is critical to your business performance.
You need advanced linguistics support, such as support for Asian languages.
You want to integrate high-end enterprise search with Office SharePoint Server 2007 (optional).

Enterprise search tightly integrated
with a business productivity infrastructure

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You want an out-of-the-box solution that delivers the most frequently demanded search features.
Streamlined integration with your business productivity infrastructure is critical to your strategy and your return on investment (ROI).
You need the ability to handle millions of documents with quick response times for the average user.

Enterprise search available as a free download

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You need a quick and easy enterprise search solution that can be set up in minutes.
Speed and ease of implementation are more important than scale and sophistication of the solution.
You want a risk-free opportunity to experiment with enterprise search on a limited scale.

Qualities of Successful Enterprise Search Solution

tara — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:18:29 GMT

There are numerous components of an enterprise search solution that will determine whether or not it is successful:

Results Relevancy

The results returned must be relevant for the users' needs. Providing relevant search results in an enterprise environment can be tricky, as link structure, site hierarchy and security all need to be considered. Relevance should be calculated using a range of rich factors, such as text matching, text analysis, metadata, language URL and click distance.

User Experience

The Interface needs to be straightforward, intuitive and familiar to encourage and enable users. Search capabilities should be available from all frequently used applications.

Searching Unstructured Data

An enterprise search solution should make sense of unstructured data, and provide users with quick, relevant results.

Searching Structured Data and Line of Business Systems

Although security of structured data is important, the ability for authorised users to find information from structured data to make informed decisions is vital. An enterprise search solution should make structured data searchable and results available to authorised users. Information stored in line of business systems is also essential to make informed and successful business decisions; however users should not need to perform separate searches to find this data. The enterprise search solution should be able to search these key business systems and return the results to a familiar user interface.

People Search

People in an organisation hold vast amounts of knowledge. It's important that employees can locate and contact subject matter experts within their organisation. As well as searching for people by name or keywords, users should be able to narrow their results, for example by region or department.

Security, Manageability and Scalability

Enterprise search solutions should provide security features for the data indexed. It should also be straightforward to manage and integrate with other systems. Finally, it should be scalable as data volumes increase.

The Need for Enterprise Search

tara — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:40:46 GMT

We all use search everyday - particularly on the Internet. We take it for granted as the starting point to find information, from a variety of different sources. We also expect search results to be timely, relevant and ordered. This standard of search is available on the Internet today, so why should we expect anything less from enterprise search?

There are many drivers for enterprise search:

Information Explosion

The amount of data generated and the volume of information we consume is increasing at a rapid rate, causing problems in locating the correct information and making sense of the data available. Employees are spending more time each year searching for information they need to complete work. An effective enterprise search system can reduce this wasted time.

Finding Information to Complete Work

Employees need to be able to find relevant information to complete their work- the right information, at the right time, in the right format, to the right person. Even though this data may be stored in different locations, users should be able to search from one central location.

Keeping Data Secure

While data needs to be searchable, it also must be protected, to ensure only authorised users can find and view it. This doesn't just mean restricting access, it means dynamically pruning search results depending on employees' permissions.

Consumer Search Experience

From their Internet search experience, users have clear demands about how a search solution should look and perform.

Searching on EPM Connect

tara — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:25:30 GMT

Just a little bit of information for you all... Microsoft's EPM Connect website now uses MOSS Enterprise Search! A glorious combination of two of my favourite technologies!

Try out the new search capabilities and let me know if you notice the difference!

Get SharePoint Specialised! - Exam 70-630: Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Configuring

tara — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 17:18:32 GMT

I've recently gained the rather grand accreditation of Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) by passing the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Configuration exam, and I encourage all technical employees of Microsoft partners who work with SharePoint (in any capacity) to do the same!

If you already regularly use of most of SharePoint's features (sites, dashboards, portals, document libraries and all of the other fantastic things SharePoint provides!), then you're off to a good start. Expand your knowledge to learn about installing and deploying SharePoint server, both from scratch and by upgrading from SharePoint Server 2003 and Content Management Server. You'll also need to know about managing users and groups and configuring security and authentication. Keep an eye on my blog, as I'll be posting information I found useful for the exam over the next few weeks.

There are numerous resources available to help you study, including classroom training, e-learning courses, books and practice exams. Full details are available on the Microsoft learning page for this exam.

Microsoft Competencies serve as a recognised level of expertise in a particular technical or business area. Achieving certifications and specialisations is vital for Microsoft partners, as they can help you:

Differentiate your skills and expertise to customers.
Extend your market reach.
Align your business with relevant Microsoft marketing initiatives.
Form closer relationships with other partners.

The world of Microsoft Specialisations and Certifications is a confusing one! The Competency associated with SharePoint is the Information Worker Competency. Within this competency, there are seven specialisations. Three of these specialisations are SharePoint related:

To enrol for the Information Worker Competency, a partner must have achieved at least one of the seven specialisations. A Roadmap to gaining the Information Worker Competency is available on the Partner Portal.

The requirements to achieve each of these specialisations involve two staff members passing at least one related exam each, as well as your organisation submitting three customer references.

Exact details of the requirements for each specialisation is available from the links below:

Passing the SharePoint Configuration exam is a great place to start on your road to becoming certified, as this particular exam can count towards gaining any of the above three specialisations. It also serves as a great starting point, if you're a new SharePoint partner, to think about which area of SharePoint you may wish to specialise in.

Gaining the Information Worker competency can be a lot of work for an organisation. You may be wondering what the real, measurable benefits are. Well, according to a 2006 IDC study, partners with the Information Worker Solutions competency out-perform other non-competent knowledge worker partners on 12 of 14 key performance indicators. Specifically, this research found that compared to the Knowledge Worker Benchmark, IW competent partners have:

Significantly shorter sales cycles and implementation times, benefiting from Microsoft's ability to connect them with high-yield prospects and Microsoft technical resources.
Service capacity utilisation rates that exceed the benchmark by 10 percentage points. They keep their technical resources billable more of the time and therefore are able to do more with fewer resources.
More productive relationships with their customers. Their number of deals per customer is over 1.5 times that of the benchmark.
Revenue growth averaging 18 per cent, significantly higher than (more than double) the growth of the benchmark companies.

Specialisations and Competencies are available for other technologies as well as SharePoint. For more details about achieving different competencies and specialisations, read through the excellent 'Guide to Earning a Competency 2008' document, available through the Partner Portal.

Happy learning!